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Internet Explorer

I HATE it. With a burning passion.

Why must these muppets at Microsoft refuse to work with the rest of the world and make things actually work together without having to pull your hair out trying to make things be consistent, just because they cant get their act together.

Come on Google, crush these hateful goons. Let us build sites in a world without these completely unnecessary hurdles and utter frustration.

While I agree with you, IE8 is actually pretty standards complient and Microsoft have caught up in a big way, I am assuming you are venting at the previous incarnations which Microsoft nor anyone else can remove from the cycle because too many organisations are fixed to it so they require it's use.

Ten years ago everyone was using Netscape as it was the dominant browser in the market. It was only when the release of Netscape 5 was delayed so that they could rebuild the browser from scratch that IE took over and became even more dominant. Fortunately now no browser dominates the market (unless you count standard compliant browsers as doing so).

Take away some of the very useful add-ins from FF and I reckon IE8 is actually a better browser. I have been a long time fan of FF, but 3.5.2 was an absolute disaster. I have downloaded 3.5.3 but haven't had a chance to check it out yet. Opera is very impressive but I still find it a bit counter intuitive (coming from a guy who has his taskbar at the top of his desktop - ) in a way I can't easily explain.

There are three kinds of men:
The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation.
The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence.

The Court of Appeals upheld the District Court's conclusion that Microsoft unlawfully maintained its operating system monopoly by engaging in a range of exclusionary conduct designed to quash the nascent threat to the applications barrier to entry posed by middleware products. In particular, Microsoft engaged in a campaign to eliminate the potential threat from the Netscape Navigator web browser by placing restrictions on OEMs, integrating Internet Explorer into Windows in a manner that did not permit users or the OEMs to remove access, and engaging in restrictive and exclusionary practices with respect to Internet Access Providers, ISVs, and Apple. Microsoft was also found to have attempted to mislead and threaten software developers in order to contain the competitive threat from "Java" middleware technologies. The Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court's conclusion that all of this exclusionary conduct violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

"I'm Commander Shepard, and this is
my favourite post on the internet."

a recent client of mine kept telling me his site looked all wrong. when i looked at his pc he was using some aol browser i didn't even know existed . And he was right, the page was a mess - just ignoring chunks of my css!. Very embarassing.

Ten years ago everyone was using Netscape as it was the dominant browser in the market. It was only when the release of Netscape 5 was delayed so that they could rebuild the browser from scratch that IE took over and became even more dominant. Fortunately now no browser dominates the market (unless you count standard compliant browsers as doing so).

Actually it was Microsoft's integration and embedding of IE into Windows which pushed Netscape off the reservation, if you look at the demographics it was only after Microsoft embedded that Netscapes numbers dropped sharply and steadily until it was a minority browser (a move which was deemed anticompetitive, not good marketing). As for your claim that no browser dominates the market, I would qualify IE's current (Q3 2009) 67.33&#37; as dominant, especially when Firefox (the second most popular browser) only has 22.73%, there is a serious amount of discrepency in the number of users there whether you choose to acknolwedge it or not.

Originally Posted by Raffles

No, I don't, but it should render the same as some old version of IE, as it is based on Trident (the layout engine). So the browser your client was using might have been the equivalent of IE4 or 5.

Just as a quick note, AOL Explorer uses whatever version of IE you have installed (through the browser shell extension API), therefore unless the client was using a very old version of Windows, their more likely to have been using IE6.

I didn't notice much of a difference over 3.0.x, other than the additions like <video>. Other than that, it seemed pretty much the same. How was it a disaster?

It crashed a lot and seemed to take forever to load pages. Didn't happen with IE, Opera or chrome.
FF 3.5.3 seems to be just as good as the versions prior to 3.5.2 in all fairness and hasn't crashed yet.

There are three kinds of men:
The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation.
The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence.

I sometimes still wonder when I see some people still using Internet Explorer.I mean it's just a waste of time using it.It has no worth now.A complete slow browser compared to others first of all, and then lots of extra features are not available which we easily get on browsers like firefox or others.It needs to be made more latest and up to date.Changing on the look won't work.

Firefox has started to slow down for me. I don't even have too many plugins installed. I hope it's not starting to get too bloated! I still use it for my web development needs, but for quick surfing I'm starting to use Chrome, except when I'm on my Linux laptop (they still don't support Linux, right?).

But I'd have to agree with the above, IE8, while I still don't use it, has fixed a lot of the issues that so aggravated me with the previous versions. My only complaint is that it took so dang long!

Rudy, While it is rubbish (IE8 has become a pretty good browser - never thought I would say that a year ago) it isn't the best browser, granted it has among the best CSS 2.1 support, but if you look in perspective at allround security, proper implementation of standards, speed/efficiency of browsing and extensibility it does fall short of the winning block. That said I wouldn't be poking my shame finger at people who use IE8 (unlike I do with IE6 and IE7), IE8 finally took the step to standards... if they got rid of ActiveX and hasLayout there would be a ticker tape parade. My nomination for best browser is Opera... fast (quicker than most), standards complient (among the best), portable (much less of a memory hog than Firefox, Safari or IE) and complete too (browser, email, IRC-Chat, newsgroups, widgets, etc).